92 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



individual heredity. His ideal was, therefore, the 

 revival in civilization of a kind of hereditary caste 

 system in which every member of society should 

 be got into his right class and should stay there. 

 The methods of government in this eugenic civiliza- 

 tion were apparently to be almost as drastic as 

 in Professor Pearson's ideal socialist State. Mr. 

 Bateson proposed to begin comparatively mildly 

 with the feeble-minded. To use his words, " The 

 union of such social vermin we should no more 

 permit than we should allow parasites to breed on 

 our own bodies." l 



It was an astounding spectacle. The absolute 

 unconsciousness in the mind of the man of science 

 of the part played by the psychic forces in the evolu- 

 tion of society and of the causes of efficiency in 

 civilization could hardly be more strikingly marked. 

 Mr. Bateson abolished with a stroke not only 

 the principles of Western civilization the sense of 

 responsibility to life, the value, and the equal value, 

 of every human life as they were set out by the 

 Bishop of Winchester. He proceeded, in the frame 

 of mind in which he was able to speak of a class of 

 his fellow-creatures as " social vermin/' to wipe out 

 the very spirit of that sense of responsibility to life 

 which had created the ethos of the Western world, 



1 Nature, 27 August 1914. 



